THEODORA ALLEN Press Highlights

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com

ARTIST THEODORA ALLEN EMBRACES THE ELEMENTS AT KASMIN GALLERY

A.G. Wollen February 7, 2019

Installation view of Theodora Allen 'Weald' at Kasmin, January 24 - March 9, 2019. Photography by Diego Flores.

In Theodora Allen’s paintings, weeds grow, translucent but stubborn. The plants themselves are drawn with scientific precision, specimen-like. While so many paintings these days announce themselves as artworks, bellowing their contemporaneity, her works seem almost like artifacts, remnants of something simultaneously here and not here—like a glassy Xerox of an ancient illuminated manuscript. They are what I imagine I’d find inside Hildegard von Bingen’s dream journal, if she were born in California in 1985.

In the first room of her show “weald” at Kasmin Gallery, seven plants look sun-bleached onto diaphanous blue shields, crests for the invisible. These plants, in Allen’s words, are all “narcotics, or destabilizers, or medicinal”— there’s your now iconographic marijuana leaf, next to your stinking nightshade, your wild poppy—but also “they are all survivalist plants. They thrive in poor soil, they don’t need a lot of water.” I respond, “The kind of plants that take over old castles.” Allen quickly jokes: “Or freeway overpasses.”

The fortress of long-fallen monarchies on a misty moor, or the intersection where the 134 freeway meets the 2, concrete woven like lace. That is where Allen’s work lives, in the barely-there distinction between the ruined and the waiting to be. The second room holds four large paintings that depict the four central symbols of the original tarot from the 15th century, suspended within a classical window motif: half portal, half bell jar. But the objects are discarded, disembodied, overgrown by the same ecosystem of plants she previously catalogued. Tendrils curl around the edges of the image; petals fall from frame.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com

Allen’s Shield (Marijuana), 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Kasmin Gallery.

Allen’s process, too, mirrors this liminal space. First, she describes how she leaves “a pool of watercolor which I let evaporate on the canvas. Dependent on climate and weather conditions, the water evaporates at different rates.” The watercolor marks the time of making and is incorporated into the drawing itself: a crack in the stone, a vein of a leaf. Then, Allen builds her hyper-detailed image with layers of oil paint, simultaneously stripping what she has put down as she goes along: “I just add and remove, essentially making and unmaking. It’s like coaxing the image into this place, in between forming and disappearing.” Eventually, the fabric of the canvas starts to wear, resisting the tide- pull of rhythmic application and erasure.

Allen embraces what she calls “the un-wieldiness of the materials,” but usually, when an artist commits to letting organic conditions dictate the shape of the work, they end up in deep abstraction, not the realm of botanical illustration. But Allen is persistently figurative, however evanescent. The references of the show—the medieval iconography, Pre-Raphaelite mythos, fin de siècle filigree, 1970s psychedelia—are all historical moments where artists pulled the past up to meet them, as the end of the world seemed newly within reach. But here, each apocalypse blurs in the blue of twilight. The world continues. Her haunting pharmakon blooms, no matter the soil.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen’s Ghostly Paintings Hark Back to the Middle Ages

Margaret Andersen January 30, 2019

Viewing myths and fairytales from a Humanist perspective, the American painter’s latest body of ethereal works reference the plants that contributed to the first widely used anaesthetics, as well as weeds and wildflowers in her native LA. Margaret Andersen visits her in the sunny Pasadena studio where she lives and works.

A shield for protection; a cup to replenish; a weapon to fight. These allegorical symbols are at the centre of artist Theodora Allen’s recent work and debut New York solo exhibition, weald, on show now at Kasmin Gallery. Part

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com landscape, part mind-scape, Allen’s otherworldly oil paintings evoke that twilight state of consciousness between waking and dreaming with her use of archetypal imagery and lush, psychotropic plant life. I visit Allen at her studio tucked away against the sunny hillsides of northeast Los Angeles, where we talk about her creative process and why the white noise that comes from living by the freeway actually sounds like the ocean, when you think about it.

You were born and raised in LA. Has that environment impacted the way you approach your work?

I think definitely the quality of light has a major influence that runs through my work, since my paintings focus on revealing that light source through layers of sheer colour without the use of applied white. But I feel like the California sunshine affects everybody’s experience of this city: even just in the sun-bleached quality of posters and books that you see in the windows of shops, or in the way the city’s been recorded through photography, there’s a certain light that’s in everything.

Botanical elements are a recurring theme in your work. Is access to nature important to you for inspiration, or are these purely imagined landscapes of the mind?

I think it’s both. One of the amazing things about living in LA is that you can be in a city and then in ten minutes be in a canyon or be by the ocean. A lot of the imagery for these paintings came out of the research I was doing at the Arboretum’s Botanical Library.

There’s always a period before I start working where I just spend time gathering information and imagery and mapping everything out. I’m inspired by weeds and wildflowers, things that aren’t necessarily rarefied plants. You’ll

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com see them growing in your backyard or on the side of a freeway overpass. There’s an accessibility and a sense of the ordinary in a lot of these plants; however, for this upcoming show I chose to focus on plants from around the world that transcend the commonplace in their use as remedies and aphrodisiacs and sacraments.

Tell us a little bit about your studio space and neighbourhood—how do your physical surroundings influence your process?

I found a very industrial space to work in right out of grad school but it never really felt like the right environment for me. So after a year of being there I started looking for a more domestic space where I could live and work. I found a small mid-century home here in Pasadena. It’s tiny but it has a lower level with an open floor plan and a lot of natural light. There’s not a lot of wall space though, so right before a show it becomes an extremely dense, salon-style workspace.

What is it like living and working in such a suburban part of the city?

It’s a very peaceful place to call home. My street is very quiet, and my neighbours are mostly older retired people. The house is situated at the top of the hill so I can sit out on my balcony and get an amazing view of the city. Pasadena is strange in that it feels far away from things but also still part of the world. Maybe it’s the fact that the freeway is so nearby. At first it really bothered me but I actually feel like I’ve come to appreciate it being there; it feels quintessentially LA that within all its disparate communities the freeways are what connects to the rest of the city. When I first moved in I was complaining about the constant white noise of the cars to a friend, but she said “Just pretend it’s the ocean.” That really changed my perspective!

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com What’s the physical process of achieving that ethereal quality in your paintings like?

For this show I took a slightly different approach from my usual process. I started with pools of watercolour and just left the pigments where they naturally wanted to run to the edges of the canvas, so when they dried it would leave this organic, watery stain. When applying oil to watercolour there’s a material resistance, which isn’t easy to control and it brings an elemental quality to the work. The linen that I paint on then becomes very atmospheric, almost like a twinkling, celestial sky.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Another part of the process involved putting down very fine layers of oil paint and then wiping it away before it dried and so you get almost a ghost image in the texture of the linen. It’s something that I developed just through trial and error but it started out because I was making a lot of painting experiments and not wanting to ever just leave things as is, so there was a lot of wiping away and painting into previous layers, allowing traces of those former images to get left behind. And then I just found that it really resonated with a lot of the themes I was exploring, and it was interesting to see the physical evidence of making and removing and the process of time.

What was the inspiration for the new series in your current show?

The show is divided into two bodies of work: Shields (dwale) and Monuments (weald). In terms of research, I came across the term “dwale”, which in old Norse means sleep or trance, and in the Middle Ages it was the term given to one of the first widely used anaesthetics, which is made out of opium, poppy, henbane and devilry nightshade, all of which are the plants that I feature in these paintings.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Dwale is also and anagram for weald, an Old English term for forest. I’ve always been interested in archaic terms. So these two words seemed to perfectly locate the work in dual form, one as landscape the other as mind-scape. But I think there’s an essential or timeless feeling to the work that transcends that notion of archaic. While the language is of the past, these symbols are still relevant to us today. They were actually taken from a card game that was used in the Middle Ages, one that would develop into the Tarot. It was used less as a form of divination and more as a way for describing the various aspects of earthly existence and the human condition. So much of my work draws from from myth and fairytales, and often the struggle in these stories is that you’re fighting against a sort of predetermined course for yourself, similarly with the Tarot. I approach it from a much more of a Humanist perspective, that it’s more of a belief in your own choices rather than these predetermined trajectories. However, the position that I want to convey in my work is that it still supports this almost universal idea of the search and our desire as human beings to know what lies ahead.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Photography by Max Knight

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Landscape / Mindscape

John Martin Tilley January 27, 2019

Plants have an enduring power over their onlookers. They seduce us with their silent stillness. They fascinate us with their ability to thrive. They entice us with their potential flavor. They ensnare us with their abilities to soothe the body and alter the mind. They are reminders of our mortality.

Theodora Allen has tapped into the myriad ways that plants intoxicate us with their latest exhibition, weald, at Paul Kasmin in New York. Her paintings are like Wedgwood china with a mystical twist—luminous and symbolic, these are pictures from a world between worlds. Archways lead us into the misty blue of her restrained palette, objects held by disembodied hands are archaic symbols lifted from The Tarot. These are still lifes with active inner lives, landscapes that are gateways into a lucid dream.

What world lies on the other side? office spoke with Theodora to find out.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com I love that the exhibition title is an anagram—it’s so cool. How did you come up with that?

In doing research for these paintings, which involved looking into the histories of various psychoactive and medicinal plants, I came across the term dwale—an Old Norse word that translates to 'trance' or 'sleep.' Dwale, also the given name for a widely used anesthetic in the middle ages; a heady tincture comprised of various narcotic herbage. Through dwale, I came across the anagram weald—another archaic term, this one from the Old English meaning 'forest.' With weald and dwale, and the linguistic play between them, we have two words that locate the imagery in the show to a misty space, somewhere at the cross section of landscape and mindscape.

There is something very Medieval about the pictures—do you have any favorite hits from Medieval or Renaissance art?

I’m endlessly inspired by the stained glass windows and woven tapestries of the Medieval period. The Unicorn Tapestries at the Cloisters are among my favorites.

I’m a fan of the Tarot card-like imagery—do you read cards? Have you ever visited a psychic?

The emblems in the Monument (weald) paintings are based on a suite of symbols from early Tarot card games from the middle ages— the cup, coin, branch, and sword—motifs that have historically stood for the various planes and experiences of earthly existence, essentially what is known as the human condition. My interest in these symbols is rooted in an inquiry that is decidedly humanist, but the avenues that we take to define and discover meaning and purpose in life are endlessly fascinating to me, and for some that includes divination. I’m interested in these histories, but I don’t personally subscribe to any such mystical belief system. I believe in the transcendent power of art.

Do you grow any plants or herbs? What kind of power do plants have over humans? How do you channel this power?

I do have an area on my hillside where I’ve cultivated a few of the plants that appear in this body of work. Most of the imagery of the Jimsonweed were gleaned from this source. The Jimsonweed plant is ubiquitous in Los Angeles— they grow wild and widespread, cropping up in wastelands and off of freeway on-ramps. In the spring, they populate the Arroyo River path near my home and studio in Pasadena, where I often walk in the evenings. From there, I borrowed a few seeds and planted them on my hillside. All of the plants in these paintings belong to a world of remedies, poisons, sacraments and aphrodesiacs that alter, enhance, or destabilize the human experience in one way or another—for better or worse.

There is a lovely sense of restraint in your work—what would happen if you totally let go?

My painting process is slow and precise. The light source in the work comes from the white ground (the gesso), so there’s a certain amount of preservation that takes place in order to maintain that purity and glow from underneath. That said, I always leave some room in the work for aberration, and for changing course along the way. Sometimes, that happens quite dramatically, and other times those decisions are subtle—faint marks and ghost images visible through the layers; a record of how they were made. If I totally let go... well, there might not be any paintings—they might take a different form entirely.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com

Monument No. 1 & 3. Images courtesy Kasmin Gallery.

Shield (Belladonna, Opium Poppy & Marijuana) Images courtesy Kasmin Gallery.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Three exhibitions to see in New York this weekend

Two venues of Andy Warhol, and young painter Theodora Allen's ancient symbolism

Linda Yablonsky, Victoria Stapley-Brown and Margaret Carrigan January 24, 2019

Installation view of the exhibition Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again Photo: Ron Amstutz. © 2018 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Looking at Theodora Allen’s delicate, muted watercolour and oil-on-linen paintings that are filled with mystical symbology, psychotropic plants, full moons and other various celestial bodies is like falling into a Pre-Raphaelite- tinged hippie fever dream. The 33-year-old Los Angeles-based artist toes the line between transcendental and twee in her debut solo show in New York at Kasmin Gallery (until 9 March) with a slew of new paintings featuring ancient symbols, tarot tropes and floral imagery that are part surreal, part kitsch. While some of her previous paintings have smacked of a Stevie Nicks album cover—particularly one of guitar ringed by a floral wreath—her newest works at Kasmin are spellbindingly sincere in their quest for meaning through beauty.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen Vigil

Andrew Berardini October, 2017

Theodora Allen, 'The Cosmic Garden II' (2016). Image: © Theodora Allen, Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles/New York/Tokyo.

Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, 24 June – 19 August

These paintings are so dreamy, they’re almost kitsch. Gossamer spiritualist encounters in veiled twilight zones and astral tides. Wildflowers and psychotropic plants sprouting unkempt around arced portals that open onto cosmic vistas, full moons and eclipsed suns, spectral rings wrapping a Saturn so close you could almost finger its gaseous bod. The plants weed untended in this drifting spaceship, lilting with life in a perpetual evening. The light’s like a bruise that just won’t heal, its tenderness permanent. A stringless guitar leans its curvy body against a post as the plants’ curled leaves unfurl around and under the curve of the archway and the gentle spherical bend of celestial bodies just beyond. Still-lifes for the ever-after and never-was, where all is softness, and the only right angles you might find clad the soundless fretboard of the abandoned instrument and the grounding corners of those archways.

These are the kind of windows some errant Romeo might sing a few lovelorn sonnets against, that poets at the end of the empires wax about as they lull the last readers into fantasies of what was lost, metaphysical windows borrowed

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com from some sunset de Chirico. In her series (of two in the show, all works 2017) The Cosmic Garden, Los Angeles’s own Theodora Allen only just brushed oil paint pictures on smokeless, soundless linens. But stare long enough into them and you can almost smell some narcotic incense and the gentle thrum of a mysterious and hypnotic sound: the spaceship’s engine, a witch’s enchantment or maybe just the hum of the mystic’s first and last prayer, which according to some summoned the universe. Oooohhhhhmmmm…

In the next sentence, I might as well ask you to join a cult.

In the room over hang a series of paintings titled The Candle, an otherworldly tarot deck of luminous candles framed with esoteric shapes. Do they cite some philosophy of the New Age, the Rosicrucians or the Theosophists, Swedenborg or Blavatsky? There are no such specific references, but the paintings allude to and shadow the occultic and spiritual, clearly made in a California where nearly everyone checks their horoscope and keeps a few crystals on hand, practises yoga and at least flirts with vegetarianism. A mystical Romanticism lives on in the Golden State, but thankfully I and it and Theodora Allen don’t take any of our moonage daydreams too seriously. Even so, Allen’s paintings don’t feel like the bright hopeful hues at the dawning of the Aquarian Age, but the twilit tones of something closing. Both a space capsule and a time capsule, one last love letter to the cosmos at the end.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com At Blum & Poe, a 'Cosmic Garden' of ghostly beauty

Leah Ollman July 14, 2017

Theodora Allen's "The Cosmic Garden I" (detail), 2016. (Blum & Poe)

In her entrancing second show at Blum & Poe, L.A. painter Theodora Allen continues to visualize the space of dreams and visions. Her two new bodies of work evoke a state of altered consciousness: Physical reality feels muted, spiritual awareness elevated.

"The Cosmic Garden" paintings represent spaces apart from the material world. Allen sets up each composition as a view through an arched window. The opening allows visual access to what lies beyond, but the framing separates here from there, the tangible world we occupy from the one imagined. Flowering plants rise along the threshold, and vines climb its edges. In each painting, a gleaming moon, ringed planet or sun in eclipse floats in the distance.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen's "The Cosmic Garden V," 2017, oil on linen, 67 inches by 51 inches (Blum & Poe)

Allen paints in near-monochrome violet and gray, the pigment whisper-thin, the underlying linen weave aerating the surface with glimmers of white. Every aspect of the work — the disjunctive scale of its subjects, the spatial illogic and the crisp, ghostly forms — reinforces the hallucinatory quality.

The other series of paintings in the show hangs separately and imbues its gallery with the meditative air of a sanctuary. Each of these intimate canvases looks similarly faded yet luminous, painted in an elemental palette of pale blood, sky and stone. Each also bears a frame-within-the frame, a slender rectangular band usually interlocked with another, circular or diamond-shaped. Centered within the geometric setting are images of one or more candles, radiating squint-worthy light. Allen here sheds the anchor of physicality altogether, conjuring spaces entirely emblematic. If "The Cosmic Garden" paintings are kin to the distilled, spiritual landscapes of Agnes Pelton and Henrietta Shore, these more closely recall the Theosophical abstractions of Kandinsky.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen's "The Diamond," 2017, oil on linen, 16 inches by 12 inches (Blum & Poe)

Several meanings of "Vigil," the show's title, apply. All focus and light, concentrations of attention, these are paintings to keep watch by. If not expressly devotional, they nevertheless embody and invite acts of devotion. They are, in keeping with another sense of the term vigil, a kind of peaceful demonstration. Their cause? A quiet, interior stillness, perhaps. A primal state of wakefulness.

Theodora Allen's "The Cosmic Garden I," 2016, oil on linen, 78 inches by 60 inches (Blum & Poe)

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen Blum & Poe / Los Angeles

Ed Schad May 18, 2015

Theodora Allen, “The Snake, No.2” (2014). Courtesy of the Artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

Theodora Allen’s paintings have the lived-in feel of worn denim or vintage t-shirts. They are executed in light hues of blue, purple and green, all washed into a mood of late-afternoon burning into evening. However, image-wise, they start with a hard graphic impulse, asserting strong shapes like arcs or diamonds as stabilizing structures that are subsequently filled with enigmatic pictures of plants, guitars, snakes, hourglasses, and a face in profile.

Odds are that many viewers will use the word “romantic” to describe Allen’s paintings, and it is true that many of the pictures reference both historical romanticism and mushier definitions of the term that populate the present. Allen’s particular use of graphics has a decidedly spiritualist feel, not unlike the pictorial strategies of Symbolist painters like Ferdinand Hodler, who sought to discover symmetry amid the wilder rhythms of nature.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com However, Allen’s take on this tradition is less high-minded romanticism and more an interpretation of romanticism filtered through California hippie culture, revived album covers, and the youthful jouissance found in grainy photographs of 1960s and 1970s America. When viewing her paintings, one is reminded of the amber-lit afternoon photo shoots of Gram Parsons or Joni Mitchell picking flowers on the side of Laurel Canyon. It is less Hodler and more the suit designs of Nudie Cohn that inspire Allen.

From these moments handed down to us via documentaries and vinyl, Allen’s snakes and twisting vines rise like totems, close cousins to the giant lips of the Rolling Stones or the emblem of Shelby Cobras rising from the hoods of Ford Mustangs. The paintings seem to pointedly suggest that there is always a bit of marketing involved in American romance, that it is always as much of a fashion as a feeling.

Art critic Robert Hughes once said, to paraphrase, that the United States’ obsession with the new is only matched by its equally overwhelming nostalgia for the past. Allen’s painting enacts this American tale once again: the constantly advertised dream of freedom in America is often only partially felt through projected image of a recently vanished history.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Theodora Allen’s spectrum of colours opens at Blum & Poe

Carren Jao March 10, 2015

Installation view of Theodora Allen’s exhibition at L.A.’s Blue & Poe. Photographer: Joshua White. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

Thirty-year-old artist Theodora Allen’s work can best be compared to a prism of colour, subtly shifting from one tone to another - an understated rainbow viewed through a glass of water. Rather than scream for attention, Allen’s work -on view until 18 April at L.A.’s Blum & Poe - captivates viewers with its nuance.

’It’s an evolved thinness,’ explains Allen, ’I applied oil paint on linen and then removed layers before it dries.’ The process removes the actual pigment, yet absorbs the colour into the canvas.

Instead of obliterating all traces of her hand, Allen celebrates it, sidesteps and successes alike. Ghost images appear over the final image like layered veils, playing peek-a-boo with the eye.

Time is clearly part of Allen’s creation equation. One portrait of a woman in profile, Flash, No.2, has been reduced so much that only a sliver of actual paint indicating the woman’s silhouette actually remains. Faint stars on the woman’s sleeve seem part of the portrait, but in truth, is a remnant of a previous image on the canvas. In Allen’s process, the

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com past is not whitewashed, it seeps through in the final piece, so much so that one cannot tell aberration from deliberate intention.

Known for her collaboration with Saint Laurent creative director Hedi Slimane from 2013 (where the artist designed a book called ’49 Paintings’ as an invitation to Saint Laurent’s fall’13 women’s ready-to-wear show), Allen is more than her erstwhile fashion association. Her first major solo show is all about the art. Ten works of varying sizes are filled with symbols borrowed from various countercultures throughout history, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the hippie culture of Los Angeles.

Her smaller works are minimalist affairs - studies in juxtaposed geometry - but these shapes sometimes return in more embellished forms in her larger pieces. Plot, No.3, for example looks to be an arched entrance to a fairy-tale land, framed by moths, weeds, and dandelions, but Allen reveals that the simple shape of a house intersecting a circle informed its basic frame.

Such is Allen’s quiet thoughtfulness presented in the show - that though her work may not immediately grab one’s attention, as bright red fire truck would - its spectral aspect somehow lingers in the mind long after walking out of the gallery.

Rather than scream for attention, Allen’s work captivates viewers with its nuance. Photographer: Joshua White. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Plot, No.3, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

Calendar, No. 2, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com Wildfire, No.1, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com ‘For the Most Part It’s Introspection’: A Talk with Theodora Allen

Theodora Allen’s inaugural show with Blum & Poe opens in L.A. on March 7

Bill Powers February 18, 2015

Theodora Allen. TYLER BRITTT

Bill Powers: The last time we met you were on your way to a Joni Mitchell concert. She was also silhouetted in a painting at your M.F.A. show at UCLA last May.

Theodora Allen: It actually wasn’t a concert that night—just an event honoring her. I’ve loved her music for a long time. I was raised on it. But, yeah, the silhouetted figure from my thesis show—it’s from concert footage from the early ’70s. Her face is in profile, with head tilted, mouth slightly open, eyes cast downward. There’s a suggestion of emotion, but nothing about the look on her face is decisively Joni. There are a few profiles like this that I keep returning to. They’re unrelated images, but they share the same downcast eyes. It’s the despondency of the gaze that sets the tone for the rest of the work. These profiles, like the plants and other objects that inhabit my paintings, are

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com both representations and analogues. There are references to ideas about transcendence, but for the most part it’s introspection, and in that regard the paintings take a decisively Humanist position.

BP: I love the fade-in/fade-out quality of your surfaces. How do you achieve that look and what do you find important about it?

TA: I build the paintings up slowly by applying thin layers of oil paint and then, using a soft cloth, I systematically remove what I’ve laid down. With each pass of the cloth, the weave of the linen becomes more pronounced, and traces of color are left behind. It’s a process that retains the traces of every decision—the material has a memory. It’s why the images in the paintings appear to be both forming and disappearing.

BP: You also had some stained-glass window sculptures in your M.F.A. show, but all the glass was clear.

TA: That’s right. I had these sealed glass boxes made using traditional stained-glass technique. The soldered seams that joined the glass together related back to the geometric elements that held together the painted compositions. The glass felt like the shell to the painting.

BP: Another hero of yours is William Blake. Tell us about him from your perspective.

TA: I’m drawn to the philosophical and mystical underpinnings in his work. Similar concerns are what interest me in the works of Odilon Redon and Hilma af Klint. And centuries later it’s coursing through the music of Judee Sill, and Gene Clark’s ‘No Other.’ Pathos as well.

BP: Your paintings were an inspiration for Hedi Slimane’s second women’s collection at Saint Laurent. Sometimes fashion and art don’t play well together.

TA: You know, I wasn’t nervous about that. Hedi and his design assistant Beth Houfek responded to the work in a way that felt genuine. It wasn’t in an “I like it because it’s beautiful” kind of way. I felt that they really got it. I admire Slimane’s headstrong approach with Saint Laurent. It’s uncompromising. It all felt right. In the year since they used my artwork for the invitation, they’ve collaborated with John Baldessari, Raymond Pettibon, and the estates of Robert Heinecken, Guy de Cointet, and Bruce Conner. I’m in great company.

BP: I loved a recent hourglass painting of yours I saw at Frieze London. Can you tell us how that piece came about?

TA: I’ve been thinking a lot about emblems of time. Markers. In the past I’ve used the metronome and the moth as symbols of this. Where the metronome’s count is infinite, and the moth’s existence is brief, the hourglass is reversible—it’s laced with hope.

BP: What’s your fascination with moths?

TA: Their internal navigation system directs them to fly toward the light, which often ends in flames.

BP: An Icarus of the natural world.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com TA: Exactly. I think the moth holds some of the same ideological implications as the butterfly, like social metamorphosis and idealism, but specifically it relates to ideas about looking inward and the risk of being burned.

BP: You also have some guitar paintings but the instruments are all missing strings. Are they somehow referring to classic images of women playing lutes?

TA: The guitar is this perfect form. It’s symmetrical, like the hourglass, and like the heart symbol that appears in other paintings of mine. It’s feminine. But it’s also an instrument for personal expression, and for sorting through our experience of the natural world—for making sense of our place in it. But the guitars in these paintings lack the strings and the tuning pegs—the sound. I’m not thinking of them as broken, or forsaken. They were built that way: unplayable.

509 West 27th Street New York NY 10001 + 1 212 563 4474 kasmingallery.com